The mission to land on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko relies on British
expertise and highlights the growing importance of the UK's space industry

After a 10-year mission and hundreds of millions of miles of travel, the Rosetta mission is preparing to make the first controlled “soft” landing on a comet – and it couldn’t have happened without Britain’s space industry.

The mission will provide the most detailed information yet about a comet’s composition and could help answer some of the questions about how life on Earth began.

As well as firing up interest in space, the mission has also highlighted just how major a player Britain is in the hi-tech industry, with British businesses building many of the systems critical to the mission’s success.

According to new data from ADS – the trade body that represents the UK’s aerospace, defence security and space companies – the UK’s space sector now has an annual turnover of £11.3bn, and grew 7.3pc last year.

It’s also a major employer, helping provide more than 100,000 jobs in total – directly employing 34,300 people in highly skilled roles and supporting a further 72,000 jobs indirectly.

Demand for UK expertise abroad means it is also helping support Britain’s push to boost overseas trade – last year space industry exports totalled £3.9bn, with 35pc of turnover from foreign market, up from less than a quarter in 2010/11.

“We are known around the world for innovating new technology to tackle the most complex challenges and the Rosetta mission is no exception.

“Across industry, we are seeing the rewards of our involvement with this and many other important long-term projects and technologies with the sector growing more than 7pc in the past year alone.”

Some of the British companies involved in the design or construction of the Philae lander include:

• e2v, based in Chelmsford, which designed and supplied the Civa camera system that will take pictures of the comet’s surface, as well as the Rolis system which will film during the descent and take images of the sites sampled by Philae’s instruments. The company also built three other camera systems on the main spacecraft, one that produced all the pictures shown so far, and others used for navigation and helping map the landing spot

• ABSL Space Products (formerly AEA), which produced innovative batteries for both Philae and the Rosetta main spacecraft, which are smaller, lighter and much more reliable than the traditional nickel-cadmium batteries. The company, which has a site in Oxfordshire, also helped develop the systems that will examine dust from the comet

• Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, which designed a “momentum wheel” that will stabilise the probe as it descends and lands on the comet

• Moog, which developed the tanks used to store helium in Philae out of its Bradford base.

Scientists from the Open University and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory were involved in the contract for the Ptolemy gas analyser instrument on the lander, which will investigate any similarities between water ice on comets and Earth’s oceans, as well as organic material on the comet. This instrument had to reduce a lab full of chemistry equipment to enable it to fit into a space the size of a shoebox.

Although the entire mission is the result of collaboration between teams of 50 contractors in from 14 European countries and the US, UK industry played an important role in its design and production. Companies involved include:

How the UK measures up in the construction of Rosetta space vehicle

• BAE Systems, which produced a “smartphone” for space communication at its technology centre in Great Baddow, Essex, which enables communication with and control of the spacecraft’s speed to fractions of a millimetre per second despite the immense distance away it is

• Airbus Defence and Space (formerly Astrium), which was the major subcontractor for the platform at its base in Stevenage

• Luton-based Telespazio VEGA Group, which helped with the overall design and also developed the on-board software

• SciSys, which is responsible for the mission control system development and maintenance

• ERS Technology helped with the development of many subsystems including the reaction wheels, solar array drive motors, Philae harpoon motors and developed the lubricant for the atomic force microscope.